


You're the Book I've Halfway Read

by akamarykate



Category: Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Space, F/F, Female Friendship, Femslash, Pre-Femslash, Reincarnation, Trope Bingo Round 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1586237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamarykate/pseuds/akamarykate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maddie and Julie have known each other by one hundred names.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're the Book I've Halfway Read

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the book. Which you should read if you haven't, and then re-read, because it is simply incredible.

**1350**

They are a wrinkled cailleach and her young apprentice. When the pestilence sweeps through the north, the villagers who shunned them a week ago come in droves to their tiny stone cottage to beg for cures, for charms, for enough sleeping draught to craft a swift, peaceful end for the poor souls who writhe on their beds stinking with boils. 

Maggie comes back from the Cavendish croft too exhausted to think, too broken to cry. "All of them, even wee Una," she whispers, and collapses on the sleeping pallet. Jennet takes her hands, dirt-crusted, shovel-torn, in her gnarled fingers, encloses them, the comfort of trees, but cannot find a word to say. It should have been her, but Maggie had insisted, trying to spare Jennet's old feet, trying to stave off the stalking, shadowy plague from the bones of age. 

But this is a disease of the young, the old, and everyone in between. It creeps in through the cracks between stones, though shared touches, shared food, shared breath, and it cares for naught but its own relentless march. All the healing craft in the land has been useless against it. No wisdom handed down through women's hands can stem the tide of sickness or the drowning grief that follows it, village after village, isle after isle, ever northward to their own tiny home. Jennet has seen it in her scrying bowl. The world that will come after is murky, so dark she can hardly tell if there is a world to come at all.

But Maggie is a light. Anyone left in the northern isles will need her to see. So the next morning, when Jennet feels the buboe under her arm, she adds sleeping draught to Maggie's porridge, enough to keep her drowsing for several days. As Maggie drifts off, hurt and betrayal etched on her face in the bright morning, Jennet soothes her hair and promises her a future. Once Maggie's asleep, before her own strength fails her, Jennet takes her potions and heads for the village. She will save who she can from the darkening ruin of her vision, so that Maggie might have a world to wake up to, a reason to go on after she digs Jennet's grave.

 

Years later, when Maggie's own fingers are twisted with hard-won victories against the dark that never stops gathering, men of God bind her hands and slip a noose around her neck. Maggie fixes her gaze upon a thrush watching from a rowan tree. As the bottom drops out of the world, the bird takes wing and flies into the light.

~*~*~*~

**1767**

Julianna's grandfather is a sea captain, and despite her parents' protests, he takes her on along on a voyage to the Mediterranean. He says she needs to see the world as much as her brothers do. Julianna thinks it will be fun, a month or two of freedom before she is betrothed, but after a few days of no view but the endless water and the sailors going about their daily chores, all the while grumbling about a woman being bad luck on a ship, the trip seems just as confining as lessons with her governess. She cannot wait to land in a new country and see a city that will change with every step, though she fears her French will be too dreadful to be understood.

She hides from the constant clomp of men's footsteps and growl of men's voices at the front of the ship, where she can taste the wind before it picks up the stink of men's bodies. She enlists a young sailor, dark-eyed and curly-haired, to drag a crate as close to the prow as her grandfather will permit. She sits on the crate and writes dutiful letters to her parents and more honest ones to her brother James. But mostly she stands with her face to the waves and the wind, teaching her body to balance itself against the swaying of the ship.

"You love it because it's like dancing," the young sailor, Matthew, accuses when he catches her at it one afternoon.

"No." Julianna turns her face to the oncoming sea, lets her cloak furl in the wind like a wing. "It's not dancing at all." The only dancing she knows is careful, mincing steps in delicate heels, hands and eyes placed just so. "It's flying."

The boat rocks in a sudden swell. She tumbles into Matthew's arms. He laughs and doesn't seem to mind where her eyes look, or that when she rights herself, her feet are atop his. "You don't know much about dancing, love," he says. 

That night, under the stars, the crew bring out their instruments, and Matthew teaches Julianna to dance a hornpipe.

~*~*~*~

**1831**

Moira is the earl's daughter, promised since she was seven to a nobleman's son. But she loves the girl who washes the linens, bakes the pies, sweeps the floors--and watches Moira stitch and dance and smile and strain against the steady drip, drip, drip of respectability. Moira is sitting at the drawing room window one day, staring off into nothing, when Jean asks her gently, deferentially, if she can help, if anything is wrong. Moira says nothing can be wrong, because she has everything a young woman is supposed to want. She isn't meant to want anything else. 

Jean, the pretty servant girl who has none of those things, nods because she understands. She checks over her shoulder to make sure the door is closed, then brushes a tentative hand over Moira's wild curls--and starts when a dove flies past the window.

"Oh," Moira gasps, catching Jean's hand in cold fingers. "I want--"

"I know," Jean says.

When Moira is wed and moves to her husband's estate, she takes Jean with her--the price, she tells her father, for her submission to his will.

When her husband dies a few short, endless years later, Moira and Jean use his money to roam about the continent. Moira leaves sharp letters from her father unanswered, too drunk on happiness and freedom to care what he--or anyone--thinks.

~*~*~*~

**1904**

Juliet totters out of the theatre in a daze, hardly noticing when her young nephew leaves her side to secure a carriage. She's wiping tears from her eyes when someone bumps into her, and her kerchief flies out of her hand. 

"I'm dreadfully sorry," says a woman, older, like Juliet, with greying curls cascading down her back. "I didn't see--couldn't see--" She shakes her head and sniffles. "Imagine, someone my age blubbering over a children's play."

"You, too?" Juliet asks as the woman dips down and retrieves her kerchief. Juliet winces in sympathy when she hears her bones creak. Their eyes meet, red-rimmed and crusted with dried tears, and their smiles warm as they each recognize a kindred spirit. "I suppose at our age it's easier to understand how Wendy must have felt standing at that window as she grew, begging Peter to come back for her."

"To not forget," the woman answers. "But you know he will."

Juliet swallows against the hard lump in her throat. "Boys always do," she says, even when her nephew reappears and takes her arm, casting a patient, if befuddled, glance at Juliet and her new friend.

"But even if he does forget, it's still beautiful." The woman hands Juliet the crumpled kerchief, "Because for a while, Wendy could fly."

~*~*~*~

**1979**

June is running through the rain; she's been visiting her brother in Sheffield and if she doesn't make the station in ten minutes she'll miss the only northbound train of the day. The last thing she wants is to spend the night on Jimmy's flea-ridden couch.

Madeleine is already late for her job at the shop, her sweater's soaked through, and the strap on her shoe breaks as she's crossing Darling Road. Of course it does. It flaps free for a step, then curls under her shoe as she steps off the curb. She stumbles and drops her bag; tries to retrieve it, but someone pulls her back onto the sidewalk as a lorry rumbles by.

"Careful," says a voice that seems familiar, even though Madeleine doesn't know the pretty blonde who's pulled her under a wide red umbrella, too late to save the mess of wild curls her hair always turns into in the rain. 

"I just--my bag--my shoe--it's been the worst day--" Madeleine stammers, but the girl smiles, and she forgets the rain, forgets her shoe, forgets her bag, forgets the shop.

Because she _remembers_.

It's been nearly forty years, and Madeleine just turned twenty-two, but she remembers.

June catches her breath when the girl she just pulled out of the street shakes with a sob. It's quieter this time, but she's heard it before. "Kiss me, Hardy," she whispers when the world stops swirling around them. "Kiss me quick."

This time Maddie does.

~*~*~*~

**2304**

They're the only ones in the mess hall when the _Jolly Roger_ 's engines overheat or burst or--Julesanne isn't sure what happens exactly. She's a navigation specialist, not an engineer. She's never spoken to the girl before--officers don't usually spend much time socializing with mechanics--but she's watched her since they launched a month ago on the exploratory expedition to Kepler-p465. Watched and hoped she was being watched in turn. 

One moment Jules is gathering her courage to at least say hello--Maddisyn, her name is Maddisyn--and the next she's sitting on her ass in the hallway, staring at sparks showering down from the ceiling while the _Jolly Roger_ shudders with aftershocks.

Without a word, Maddisyn catches Jules's hand and pulls her to her feet. "Shuttle," she gasps, and they run through the noise, through metal tearing and chunks of the ship falling, through bangs and distant shouts, for the nearest escape pod. 

"There might be someone else," Jules says as they stumble aboard. She looks back down the hall, but Maddisyn drags her into the tiny shuttle, smaller than Jules's quarters. 

"No time. They're set for autolaunch. Strap in." Maddisyn throws herself into the pilot's chair as the door slams closed, cutting off the sounds of the dying ship. The shuttle is thrown forward--maybe by the computers, but maybe by the force of the second explosion, the one that tears the _Jolly Roger_ in half--just as Jules drops into the only other seat. She stares out the viewscreen at the silent, burning wreckage of the ship that was meant to be their home for the next four years while Maddisyn barks commands the shuttle's controls.

"Are there any other shuttles?" Jules asks. "Did anyone else make it off?"

"Maybe. Probably. They might be on the other side of--" She glances at the viewscreen, then back to her controls. "The explosion must have taken out the comlinks." Her voice cracks on the last word.

Jules clasps her own shaking hands together in her lap. "Can you fly this thing?"

"I can fly anything." Sparking at the challenge, just as Jules hoped she would, Maddisyn swipes at screens, snaps commands. The tiny ship's engines settle from a rattle to a smooth hum. The wreckage of the Jolly Roger becomes a star, then a pinpoint, then nothing. "But where?"

Jules consults the nav screen, sees choices to be made. But first she has to settle her spinning brain, her cracked heart. 

"Sir?" Maddisyn asks. Her eyes, huge and scared, remind Jules of why she'd followed her into the mess, even though she'd spent weeks telling herself not to do something she'd regret, personally or professionally or most likely both. But now--

Now, whatever happened to the _Jolly Roger_ , there isn't much 'professional' left to worry about. Depending on how far they are from another ship or a habitable planet, there may not be much 'personal' left either. And there isn't room in this little capsule to hide.

She grabs Maddisyn's arm, pulls her in close, and kisses her, deep and hard and a breath longer than her whispered, "For luck," should warrant. When Maddisyn pulls back, her eyes are still big, but she doesn't look scared any more. 

"Where?" she asks again.

"Second star to the left." Jules turns Maddisyn's chair to face the viewscreen, where the impossible river of the galaxy flows between them and the nearest friendly planet. "And straight on 'til morning."

**Author's Note:**

> The title and summary are based on the song ["One Hundred Names"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aoop0_TpxqI) by The Nields.


End file.
